Do you ever stay awake nights wondering how to keep your finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction? Of course you do. Well, the answer is actually very simple – read B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction.
For example, The Guardian has a laudatory review of last week’s excerpted novel The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik, saying the “novel is as tightly constructed as a box, and this is as sly a bit of unreliable narration as I have read in a long while…”. The reviewer, Nicholas Lezard, further points out that Ørstavik has been translated into 18 languages but only now into English.
Then, at World Literature Today there is an interview with EJ Van Lanen, founder of publisher Frisch & Co., who speaks about the difference between print and online publishing, being located in Berlin, the books he’s published so far (two of which have been excerpted in B O D Y: Under This Terrible Sun by Carlos Busqued and The Swimmers by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre).
He also talks extensively about Frisch & Co.’s next publication: “Next month, we’re starting a wonderful project. One of my favorite novelists, Andreas Maier, started writing a series of novels a few years ago, about his family, his childhood, the town he grew up in—it’s a panoramic view of postwar Germany as experienced in a small town outside Frankfurt.”
This also happens to be the upcoming selection in Saturday European Fiction this week, so stay tuned to get a preview of one of Germany’s newest literary sensations and read more about him and his publisher in the interview.
Photo – Modern architecture patern. Nagasaki, Nagasaki Prefecture, island of Kyushu, Japan/Mstyslav Chernov/wikimedia
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